Adventures In Costuming Part 2: The Quest for Skillz

So as I mentioned earlier I decided to try my hand at costuming and my first event would be WonderCon 2012. (happening the days I’m typing this no less.) Anywho, so I mentioned the boots in the last post but the bulk of the costume still needed to be sourced. I was actually going to try to match as close as I could to my friend’s S.H.I.E.L.D. suit which is more or less a flight suit with a few adornments, but unfortunately the flight suit had been discontinued many months ago and buying the same one was impossible. So after scouring surplus stores in Hollywood, Burbank and Silver Lake I found this one which wasn’t really perfect but had a few things about it that made it better than the others.

When I bought it I actually thought it had flaps for the pockets but it clearly doesn’t. So after a trip to the fabric store picking up some white piping and a little bit of what I thought was canvas (turned out to be something else, of course I didn’t figure this out till I melted some with my iron, but anywho) and some white piping and thread I was about ready to go. The first and biggest task was the piping and boy what a pain it was to work with. The amount of fabric it gives you to stitch with was thin, maybe 1/4” and my sewing skills although accounted for were extremely rusty. After completely missing the first time stitching and then running off of the coveralls because the fabric was so thick in certain spots I finally just ended up hand cranking the machine all the way. It took forever and really didn’t come out perfect, but it worked. From there is it was trying it on that revealed the plan of flipping up the collar to seem more fitted was a bust. The collar flipped up was almost 4 inches which put it into my jaw and looked horrible. I suppose you learn things as you go but it meant ripping out half the seams I just spent the better part of 2 hours putting in. I decided to fold the collar in half and sew it in, this gave is the appropriate length but left an undesirable look in the front. The suit I was trying to match actually had a flap that covered the neck and velcroed to the other side and while I was going to skip that detail it seemed like I would now be killing two birds with one stone by adding it to my coveralls and I had bought plenty of extra material for the pocket flaps. Seams ripped, collar sewed, flap attached piping re-sewed and trimmed and my suit was finally starting to look respectable although I’m sure a real tailor or seamster would cringe at a lot of my work.
From there is was all about details. My friend had made up shield and name patches that I just needed to trim and attach some velcro to. (I did his as well as mine and a few others since I had the machine out anyways.)

I personally think the Dugan patch should read “T. Dugan” not “D.D. Dugan” but who am I to argue over free stuff. After the patches came gathering white leather belts for the harness, a few velcro shield emblems, and a bowler hat and you get something pretty decent.

I also found this plastic grenade that I sprayed white that I thought might look fun.

All in all I’m pretty ecstatic with how it turned out. But, I figured the real test would to be how many people took pictures with/of me at WonderCon dressed up and posted them, so you’ll have to wait for those to see the final product. It all happened today and I was floored with the response, but that’s another story for another post.

less than three…

1 year ago  /  3 notes